WASHINGTON-President Clinton was questioned under oath last week by the independent counsel investigating alleged influence peddling and campaign finance violations against Labor Secretary Alexis Herman in connection with her role in helping Mobile Communications Holdings Inc. obtain a global satellite phone license from the Federal Communications Commission in 1997.
Accompanying Independent Counsel Ralph Lancaster in the hour-long interview of the president were associates John Kotelly and David Barry.
Last year, a three-judge panel here appointed Lancaster, a Maine attorney, following Attorney General Janet Reno’s May 1998 call for an independent counsel in the Herman case.
“This matter relates to events that occurred while Secretary Herman was at the White House, so I certainly expected that the independent counsel would meet with the president,” said W. Neil Eggleston, Herman’s attorney.
In the past, Herman has denied any wrongdoing and Clinton has backed her up.
Representing Clinton during the interview were White House lawyers Beth Nolan, Cheryl Mills and Karl Racine. The president’s personal attorneys, David Kendall and Nicole Seligman, also were present.
The White House made public Clinton’s questioning after it was completed.
“Consistent with prior practice, no further statement about the interview will be made,” said Nolan.
Last week’s development provided the first glimpse into where Lancaster’s probe may be headed. The Herman investigation has been uncharacteristically quiet and tame compared with other, high-profile independent counsel investigations of Clinton and his cabinet members in recent years.
The Washington Post last week reported Lancaster has met often in past weeks with a federal grand jury impaneled here and that Lancaster was seen in the courthouse for several hours following the Clinton interview last Wednesday.
A knowledgeable source said Lancaster served MCHI subpoenas last week. MCHI declined to comment.
Clinton’s testimony in the Herman case, one of the few remaining probes under the now-defunct independent counsel law, followed by only a day a misdemeanor guilty plea by former housing secretary Henry Cisneros in a separate independent counsel investigation.
Lancaster’s office declined to respond to a request for comment. RCR reported on Lancaster’s low-key probe of Herman on Aug. 16.
Lancaster’s investigation focuses on Herman’s activities during Clinton’s first term, between 1993 and 1996, when she headed the White House Office of Public Liaison.
Herman’s chief accuser is Cameroon businessman Laurent Yene. Yene, among other things, alleges Herman used her political sway as a White House aide in 1996 to help MCHI, a Washington, D.C., firm whose low-earth-orbit satellite application was rejected by the FCC in 1995 on financial grounds.
The FCC in July 1997 waived financial requirements and granted MCHI a license to build a $1.1 billion global satellite phone system, called Ellipso.
Herman’s intervention on behalf of MCHI, according to Yene, was tied to a broader business arrangement whereby Herman would receive 10 percent of all business she brought to her former consulting firm.
Before joining the White House in 1993, Herman sold her consulting firm to close friend Vanessa Weaver for $88,000. That gave Weaver and her clients exceptional access to the White House, according to the Justice Department.
Weaver and Yene later set up their own consulting firm, International Investments and Business and Development. Later the two had a personal and business falling out.
Weaver attorney E. Lawrence Barcella has called Yene “a vengeful and unreliable former boyfriend and businessman.”
However, the Justice Department last year said much of Yene’s story checked out.
Yene reached out to the Justice Department and the news media in 1997, when Herman’s Senate confirmation was in limbo. At that time, Yene unleashed influence peddling and illegal campaign finance allegations against Herman.
In spring 1996, Yene said he gave Herman a cash-filled envelope but Justice said it could not establish whether the event occurred, or if it did, whether the money constituted a kickback to Herman.
During the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, Yene said Herman directed Weaver to solicit more than $250,000 from her clients (including one who was a foreigner) through another Weaver business, Alignment Strategies Inc. The objective, according to Yene, was to help secure a license for MCHI.
Justice last year said it confirmed more than $250,000 was received by Alignment Strategies from or on behalf of a foreign businessman’s firm in the last quarter of 1996.
Foreign campaign contributions generally are illegal, though U.S. affiliates of overseas firms can give soft (unregulated) money to political candidates.
Yene also said Weaver, at Herman’s direction, told him to solicit a campaign contribution to the Democratic National Committee from the president of MCHI. Yene said he collected $10,000 from the MCHI officer. Justice confirmed that as well.
Justice also substantiated that Weaver and her sister, who did not have a history of giving to political candidates, gave nearly $240,000 in campaign contributions in late 1996.
Yene and Weaver, before going separate ways, were hired by Singapore businessman Abdul Rahman, who runs a Singapore-based aircraft firm called Global Aero Design Centre Pte. Ltd., to win support for MCHI after the FCC rejected its license application in 1995. Rahman is reported to have been socially involved with Herman.
The Washington Post reported Rahman met Clinton in 1996 at a fund-raiser in Virginia where Herman was present.
Herman in 1996 asked Greg Simon, a telecom lobbyist and former chief domestic policy advisor to Vice President Gore, to meet with MCHI representatives. Simon subsequently met with representatives of MCHI, which had undertaken an aggressive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and at the FCC to secure approval of its global satellite phone application the second time around.
The timing of the MCHI lobbying coincided with the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, which later became the subject of close congressional scrutiny and criticism because of many irregularities.
The FCC’s International Bureau, waiving financial rules, granted MCHI a big LEO satellite in July 1997.
